


i can feel his ghost breathing down my back

by smallwerewolf



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, Alcoholism, Anal Sex, Anonymous Sex, Barebacking, Corpo V (Cyberpunk 2077), Cross-Generation Relationship, Cruising, Cyberpunk 2020/larger Pondsmith canon, Desi Character, Drug Use, Filipino Character, Grief/Mourning, Jollibee still exists in 2077, M/M, Nostalgia, Older Man/Younger Man, Oral Sex, Phalloplasty, Slow Burn, absentee brown dad club, chosen family, now with illustrations from the author!, post-transition character, riding fast at night on your dead ex-lover’s bike, trans johnny
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:55:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28891716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallwerewolf/pseuds/smallwerewolf
Summary: That was the closest they ever came to talking about it: sitting in the Hella, smoking a joint with the radio on. V remembered him in profile, wreathed in a haze of smoke, his nose as aquiline as in youth. “You seeing anyone?” Light flickered behind Jackie’s cupped hand.A sly, sideways look, meeting his gaze defiantly for four, five, six thundering heartbeats—and then V looked away because he felt too much in his chest. He constructed the architecture of a dozen potential conversations, all of them lost before they gained trajectory.———On wanting, and hurt, and healing. An exploration of V’s mourning for Jackie, his friendship with Johnny, and his eventual relationship with Kerry.
Relationships: Kerry Eurodyne/Male V, Kerry Eurodyne/V, V/Jackie Welles, V/Pepe
Comments: 24
Kudos: 66





	1. real truth about it is

**Author's Note:**

> Long time listener, first time caller/this is the first piece of fanfic I’ve ever written to completion. I don’t think a video game has ever elicited this kind of emotional response in me before. Title is from Farewell Transmission by Songs: Ohia. Made a playlist to go with this, however long it ends up being: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3D6HMxQlIwdBRUvcM3iPHD?si=BkfB14iCSJCvLkEGHAuROg
> 
> I’m writing this as I do a second playthrough, so... updates will be slow.

> _Where we could be boys together. This region of want:_  
>  _the campestrial flat. The adolescents roving across the plat._  
>  _Come hither. He-of-the-hard would call me hither._
> 
> _Sheer abdomen, sheer slickensides, the feldspar buttes_  
>  _that mammillate the valley right where it needs to bust._
> 
> _And I could kiss his tits and he could destroy me_  
>  _on the inflorescent slopes; in his darkest dingles;_  
>  _upon the grassland’s raffish plaits. And he could roll me_  
>  _in coyote brush: I who was banished to the barren_  
>  _could come back into his fold, and I_  
>  _would let him lay me down on the cold, cold ground._

— from Boonies, by D.A. Powell

The grief came in endless waves. It swallowed him whole, hollowed him out, gutted V from throat to pubis. It was constant and immeasurable. He would lie in bed beneath Misty’s dreamcatcher and think, before sleep came: what remains of him but this? A framed photo on the coffee table of them as boys, turned face-down.

* * *

Months later, visiting the clinic as much to sate his own loneliness as to upgrade some implants, Vik mentioned to V that he’d woken between hallucinations—no, _not_ hallucinations but Johnny’s borrowed memories—feverish and crazed, yelling, panicked, that Jackie’s body was still in the Delamain. Misty had to hold him down until Vic got the needle in him and he slipped back into a dreamless, narcotic slumber.

* * *

He told Misty, eventually: about them crowded as kids into Jack’s twin bed, sticky with summer heat, their awkward bodies sweating, growing hair and pimples; grooming in the mirror, brushing their teeth side-by-side in the mornings when they were both still going to school (V stayed; Jack sure as hell didn’t). Touching each other’s changing bodies, “practicing” kissing—stuff that Jack never brought up as they got older. He remembered Jackie’s freckled dick, how he was flushed darker between his thighs than elsewhere.

V started getting hairy first, under his arms and all over his belly and wrists and ass and above his cock and the scraggly black hairs on his chest. They’d crowd in front of the little mirror in his room, pressed cheek-to-cheek to compare whispy caricatures of mustaches. The two of them were both mutts: absent brown dads, white moms. V’s Spanish was better than his Gujarati from all the time spent at the Welles’ house, all the mornings and evenings squabbling across the table with Jackie’s brothers.

“I loved him, Misty,” V told her, his voice cracking. “I know,” she soothed. 

“No,” he said, hardly able to get the words out. “I mean—“

* * *

He tried to come home every other day, every three days at most: he’d shower, shave, change his clothes, do laundry if he needed to; resupply the pills in his glovebox and in the under-seat compartment of the Arch and in little dime bags that he wrote on in permanent marker (JOHNNY + and JOHNNY -, he’d scrawl, in cramped, square capitals). Get at least 6 or 7 hours of blessed sleep in his own bed and not some roach-infested motel in another corner of the city. Barry would stop by to feed Nibbles and scoop the litter and play with her on the days V couldn’t make it. The man liked animals, and fuck cops, of course, but he wasn’t one any longer and didn’t talk to his old coworkers—not after the way they’d treated him.

* * *

When they were kids, he and Jackie would gorge themselves sick on loquats. Jack was always taller: he’d boost V up into the crown, where he’d pick handfuls of yellow fruit and toss them down for Jackie to catch. They’d go home with their mouths and palms sticky. He remembered when there were still flying things: birds and bees and bats, and how abruptly they had disappeared. Now, the city’s workers hand-pollinated what little was left. The fruit trees in Heywood were long since gone.

He’d found a pit in the desk drawer at Jackie’s garage, dried and shrunken. The grooves of his teeth twenty years ago had scraped it clean of flesh. V swallowed it. As if the traces of his spit could transmute death, dissolve into his bloodstream.

* * *

“Were you in his head?” he asked Johnny once. “I mean—long enough to know him at all.” 

A long silence. “No. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you wanted.” They didn’t speak the rest of the night.

* * *

He took Pepe home after the job tracking his wife. “I have to go,” the bartender said when V showed up, right before closing. He needed to put his kid to bed. “Let Cynthia do it,” V murmured, and he leaned over the bar to fist the hem of Pepe’s shirt in one hand and pull him closer. He yielded. 

He spat mezcal back into Pepe’s mouth, mustache to mustache. His cock was like V’s—thick, veiny, brown, with a beautiful little rosette of foreskin at the tip—but wider, obscenely so, and longer still. No scars; all organic meat here. V wanted it in him as soon as Pepe pulled it out from the button fly of his jeans in the passenger seat of the Hella, wanted to be fucked for the first time in so long, but it wouldn’t fit, not with poppers, not with weed. His body was so locked up. “Relax,” Pepe muttered, his cockhead pressed slickly against V’s asshole, but he couldn’t. He sucked him, worked his tongue around the slick head—not like Jack’s, rough from being cut high and tight, rubbing against his bleached briefs and then later his boxers. He tasted like loneliness. 

Pepe’s broad body covered his, moved down, gave him sloppy, toothy head—“Jesus, softer”—and the bartender maneuvered his big body around, head pressed to the bookcase, muscled legs up: “in me, V”, fingered him open with spit and lube and then he was inside him, fucking slow and deep, feeling the tight wet ring of Pepe’s ass pulling on him, sucking him in to the balls. He groaned, leaned over him. Looked Pepe hotly in the eye, black heavy lashes shadowing brown irises, his long hair falling around his face. V spat in his mouth and saw Jack’s face for a moment—he couldn’t tell if it was the Relic or grief or lack of sleep or a combination of all three—and Pepe’s cock grew half-hard again against his stomach, a little spurt of precum that grew until it trickled and his dick jerked, lengthening, and V held himself up with one hand and stroked Pepe with the other and fucked him deep until he jizzed all over his own chest, gave a bellowing yell, eyes screwed shut, fucking himself back on V while his ass fluttered, contracting tight around him. V sagged. He hadn’t cum, couldn’t; his dick softened only a minute after he pulled out and wiped himself off.

Later, in the shower, he came to the thought of when Jack had fucked him for the first time, 14 and clumsy and tender and terrified, and the intensity of his orgasm shook him to where his knees nearly buckled and he sat in the water and cried. Thought of himself then: soft kid putting up a hard fucking front. Hair on his lip first coming in. Big ugly, snotty sobs, until Johnny glitched into the doorframe and he downed an omega blocker. No snide comments, not tonight.

He toweled off and got into bed. Nibbles pressed her little velveteen body back against him and purred.


	2. mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thanks for all the kudos! Comments are also great and def spur me to write more/more often. 🙃

The backing in the frame was loose—he needed to wedge a piece of cardboard or something in there. V was crouched next to the coffee table; outside, through the unshuttered window, the light was draining from the sky. 

“You miss him, huh?” Johnny lowered his smudged aviators to the bridge of his nose. V sucked his teeth, loud enough to hear; his irritated frown crumbled into the beginning of anger. Sweat prickled the back of his neck. “You don’t get to talk to me about him—“ 

Johnny glitched so he was next to Nibbles, who laid stretched out in a puddle of amber light. He had developed a fondness for her that V was still stunned by. “Hey—” (hands up in surrender, run through with blue lines) “—I was just checking in. I know... I know he meant a lot to you.” Silence. Johnny registered that he was meant to say more. Through the ignition of a cigarette: “I won’t say shit, V. Promise. I’ll just listen.” He bent nearly double to try and stroke the cat, frowning when his hand passed right through her. V sat at the right edge of the curved couch, his elbows braced against his knees, cradling the photograph in his open palms. 

“Fucking... fine,” V muttered darkly. “We were... I don’t know, 14, 15. I didn’t see him for years after.” 

Johnny squinted, pointed with a nicotine-yellowed finger at the orange blooms ringing V and Jackie’s necks. “What’s with all the flowers?”

It must have been Diwali: standing in front of the crookedly-framed door to V’s room, they were both garlanded with marigolds, an extravagance his mother wouldn’t have allowed at any other time of year. Jackie had his ridiculous little cholo rat tail, the rest of his hair cropped short and brushed down with gel. Big white t-shirt, fake gold Cuban link, trying to look like a real _vato loco_. Jack had a half-smile; V was laughing at some joke lost to time, unremembered, his mouth open a little to show the crooked eyetooth he’d never bothered to get fixed. They went their separate ways. They didn’t talk about it, or have a fight—it just happened slowly enough that they never saw it coming. Jackie showed up a year later at V’s dad’s funeral (cancer from years of chemical exposure while working for Petrochem) with his mom, two heads taller than when he’d seen him last, looking awkward in an ill-fitting suit. Mama Welles hugged him tearfully, and he and Jackie sat eating at the wake, talking about nothing of any importance, feeling put off by this obligatory show of sympathy. Trying to avoid the real shit, the things that made his throat tight and tears well up in his eyes. V stayed in school, got scouted by Arasaka. He didn’t know about Jack getting shot until years later. “I told him he should call you,” Misty said, “but he was trying to be tough. Kinda—felt weird, you making the choice to stay in school when, you know, the rest of us didn’t.”

* * *

Jackie called him on June 3rd, 2072—V remembered because it was the day after his mother’s funeral. Lupe had seen the obituary. They met at El Coyote Cojo, and Jackie crushed V’s smaller body against his in a hug. His breadth was familiar and reassuring. “Jesus, choom,” V laughed. “What happened to your fucking hairline?” That was also the first time he saw Pepe: backlit in red light, moving boxes from out back to the stockroom. Big ropy arms, big ass, leather vest open to his sternum. V watched him move around the room, openly and without shame, and Jackie followed his gaze with his verdigris-green eyes and gave an aborted, snorting laugh. “He’s married, _ese_ ,” Jack said, leaning close. 

That was the closest they ever came to talking about it: sitting in the Hella, smoking a joint with the radio on. V remembered him in profile, wreathed in a haze of smoke, his nose as aquiline as in youth. “You seeing anyone?” Light flickered behind Jack’s cupped hand. 

“Nah. Just dockin’ sometimes. No time on the corpo grind.” V took the offered weed, sucked deeply. Turned to look into his oldest friend’s green, green eyes. 

“Man,” Jack blurted, laughing, “you _must_ be able to get that fuckin’ tooth fixed with the money you’re making.” V’s lip twitched up to show the crooked canine: “Nah. I like it. It’s me.” 

Jackie eyed the joint disapprovingly. “Choom, you still can’t roll for shit. This looks like a cat turd.”

A sly, sideways look, meeting his gaze defiantly for four, five, six thundering heartbeats—and then V looked away because he felt too much in his chest. He constructed the architecture of a dozen potential conversations, all of them lost before they gained trajectory.

* * *

There were so many dammed-up memories that came to him at the brink of sleep. 

Fragments from the memorial:

He sat with Lupe to drink a beer, her lined face tight. “ _Mijo_ ,” she said brokenly. Any resolve he had left in him vanished. Her expression crumpled. V pulled her to him, his eyes stinging, and felt tears dampening the fabric of his shirt. “I’m so sorry,” he told her, as if that could encompass all the feeling in the room.

Sitting with Misty on the curb. Somewhere between their adolescence and adulthood, something had split between her and Mama Welles. V hadn’t known. She helped pull up the aluminum garage door, pushed from squat to standing together.

He spoke with Lupe again before he left, urging her to make peace with Misty. “V,” she said, cradling his head in one hand, tucking his long hair behind his ear with the other—she was the closest living thing he had to a mother, and he leaned into her touch like a cat seeking affection—“It isn’t your fault.”

His grief is intense and total.

* * *

He‘d still stop at the garage, sometimes alone, sometimes with Misty. They’d sit there wordlessly, drinking their way through Jackie’s strategic reserve. It turned into a ritual for V. Garage, stop by El Coyote, maybe suck Pepe’s dick in the back room (until he went back to his wife), leave marigolds at Jackie’s ofrenda, wash out his mouth, and meet back up with Misty for dinner with Mama Welles. He bought her a tube of achiote paste, the real stuff, and she made them cochinita pibil.

Afterwards, he stood in the doorway of Jackie’s childhood room down the hall. The bed was still made, although everything was covered with a fine film of dust. Mama Welles came up behind him and fit her open hand between his shoulderblades. “Hey,” he started, smiling. “Lupe—” 

She cut him off. “Your mother could call me that, Vikram. Not you.” A little abashed at her using his given name, V turned to face her where she leaned against the wall. 

“Do you think she’d be proud of me?” They hadn’t talked about her in a very long time. Lupe’s brow furrowed; her hand came up to squeeze his shoulder affectionately, and she gave him a soft, sad smile. 

“I don’t know.” She sighed, let her weight settle back against the open door. “I can’t answer that truthfully, _chico_. We always wanted something better for you boys.” She pursed her lips into a straight line. “I don’t know that we were able to give it to you.” 

She walked past him into the room and pulled a photograph from a stack of papers. “I have something for you,” Lupe said, handing V the picture—it was him and Jackie a year and a half ago, seated at the kitchen table with red glasses of ponche Navideño. The chill had snuck inside, one of those rare nights in NC that the temps still dropped low. “I remember you taking that,” he said softly. “I didn’t realize he’d had it printed.”

* * *

V burnt himself on the bike’s tailpipe the first time he rode it out of Jackie’s garage. There is a flat, darker scar against the brown of his skin a few inches below the back of his left knee. Sometimes, he presses his fingers against it until it aches.


	3. must be the big star about to fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of this chapter is inspired by the following: https://threi.tumblr.com/post/641104002444115968/yes

He dreamed he was falling.

He dreamed of Jackie’s anxious face, underlit with red, as they hunched against each other in the maintenance shaft. He dreamed of his best friend’s hand coming away wet with blood from the wound in his gut.

“Hey. You were having another nightmare.”

V woke to the weird, still-unfamiliar grip of Johnny’s hand on his shoulder—pressure without the warmth of a living body. He was soaked with sweat (his first thought was that he’d pissed the bed, somehow), his hair plastered to his shoulders, scrotum stuck to his leg under his briefs; Nibbles was curled against his hip and meowed plaintively as V rolled to the edge of the bed. “Fuck,” he muttered. He ground his open palms against his eye sockets.

He’d had to work himself to exhaustion lately to get to sleep; Misty had supplied him with synth-lavandin and valerian sprays, magnesium and 5-HTP supplements, all manner of anti-histamines and prescribed sleep aids—until this week, when for the first time, Nibbles had come up on his bed seeking companionship. V had fallen asleep last night with her warm, purring little body balled up in the crook of his shoulder; at some point she’d apparently moved, but stayed pressed against the damp human heat of him throughout the night. She was none too pleased to be disturbed from her slumber; she nuzzled V’s bare, hairy thigh and pleaded for food with croaky meows. Johnny’s usually neutral face was—what, awed? soft? tender?—as V kneeled to scoop her wrinkled body up against his chest.

His head was pounding, he realized. He dropped Nibbles back on the bed, stood unsteadily, and walked to the bathroom; he emptied his bladder and then mixed powdered citric acid and table salt in water.

“There was an iguana,” V murmured before downing the glass in big gulps, his voice still rough with sleep. Johnny flickered into view in the mirror: “what?”

“In Yorinobo’s penthouse—I just remembered.” V laughed raggedly. He pushed his damp hair back from his face. “It—it was under a heat lamp. I’d never seen one before.”

Johnny snorted. “We’ll have to sit down sometime and I can walk you through all the wretched fuckin’ creatures I encountered during the war.” He assessed V’s bedhead as the ex-corpo began to shave off two days worth of beard, watched a runnel of sweat trickle down the groove of his spine. “You look like shit, V,” Johnny told him, wiping the lenses of his aviators with the hem of his shirt. “Get in the shower. We’re going to Clouds.”

The cat walked through the flickering blue of Johnny’s leg, gave an exaggerated, yawning stretch, and flopped onto her left side to lay against the cool tile.

* * *

On the packed monorail, he stood with his back to the door. For some mysterious reason (V still couldn’t work out his passenger’s machinations—he also couldn’t figure out how Nibbles was able to see an engram?), Johnny had asked him to stop at the Japantown West station and walk the rest of the way to Megabuilding H8. It was clear and warm along the river; he had his hair down to better feel the wind coming off the water run through it. He turned off of Capitola to a concrete strip crowded with vending machines and a single unmanned news kiosk. Johnny glitched to his right, and the rockerboy’s face cycled through bemusement and disappointment in turns.

“Um. Why are we here?” V quested, squinting at what Johnny seemed to be fixated on: a multi-story building, gated and boarded-up with sheets of corrugated steel, sitting behind what looked to be years worth of rotting trash and cardboard and broken glass. “This,” Johnny announced, gesturing from the garbage-strewn curb to the unmarked awning with a lit cigarette in hand, “used to be Atlantis.” V searched for the ghost of a logo or some lettering on the building and found none.

“Are... you sure?”

Johnny glared at him, obviously annoyed, and answered through an inhale of smoke: “yes, I’m sure.” V walked up to the barricade, tested it with one hand. “I know we’ve got somewhere to be,” he said, turning to look at Silverhand over one shoulder, “but I’m pretty sure I could force the gate.” Johnny seemed to consider his proposition, looking at V over the top of his sunglasses.

“I—“ He started and then grimaced, waved the notion away with his unoccupied hand. “Later on, V. Maybe. Let’s get going.”

As they walked away, V caught him glancing back with something that looked like regret.

* * *

He was afraid of dying, he realized. Fear blocked up his throat, bound his tongue. Some kind of unlocatable desire filled up the space under his ribs.

“You are sensitive,” Angel murmured, and he felt his eyes sting, his guts tied up in squirmy knots. “That does not make you weak.” V let a big, shuddering sob loose from deep in his chest and shifted his knee to press up against the other man’s. No one had spoken to him with such tenderness in years.

“If you just burn all the world to the ground, then let it burn,” Angel whispered.

“I don’t wanna go out there,” V told him, and he didn’t. He wanted to stay in this blue room with the striped bedcovers forever and ignore his fate.

* * *

They came back to the shuttered building the next day.

“Well,” Johnny muttered, flicking the butt of a digital cigarette into the gutter, “here we are again.”

It seemed as good a time as any for V to try out the new cyberware he’d had installed earlier that week. His servo-enhanced palms closed around one bar of the gate and pulled to the side; the cross-woven wire crumpled like paper in his grip, accordioned into a compact tangle of metal mesh. V pushed aside the garbage bags blocking the way as gingerly as he could with the outstep of one boot, clearing a path to the padlocked door (which he pulled open as easily as he had pulled aside the gate).

The whole interior was blue-gray with shadow; V’s Kiroshis adjusted to enhance what little light filtered in. He felt along the opposite wall for a circuit breaker, found one, and flipped it: warm strip lights scattered around the club hummed and flickered to life.

Johnny whistled and pushed his sunglasses to the crown of his head.

V’s footprints made tracks in a layer of dust that he estimated was around two centimeters thick. “I don’t know how long—“ he started, and then paused for his face to scrunch up before a big sneeze tore out of him. “Fuck. I don’t know when this place closed down, but I’m gonna guess it wasn’t long after you, uh, departed from this mortal coil or whatever.” A moment later, he added: “Saying you died doesn’t... seem like the right word, considering.” V tried to blow his nose in a balled-up bandana as discreetly as possible, despite Johnny being the only observer.

The paint on the wall was peeling off in wide ribbons; frayed cables hung in loops and tangles from the ceiling. V walked the perimeter of the room, watching Johnny swing his long, lean body over the bar.

Silverhand was smirking wryly, standing next to a display of dusty bottles of tequila. “V. You gotta take some of this home. Preem shit, aged to perfection.”

“Sure,” V answered without looking. “On the way out.” He was in a corner, bent forwards into a booth to see how the quilted leather upholstery was coming undone. “Going up to the next floor,” he called out, and walked across the scuffed dance floor to the stairs.

“It’s the only other floor,” Johnny responded, and glitched next to V a moment later.

On the landing were wheatpasted flyers for bands he’d never heard of, scrawled over with ancient graffiti; the only one he recognized was a wrecked Samurai poster for a show in New Orleans. “Is it weird, being back here?” he asked Johnny.

“Yeah, I guess. Lots of memories. Thought I’d said goodbye to this place.”

V crossed the room to stand before the massive, red-tinted window that took up the entire span of the floor to the ceiling, and watched the flow of traffic and bodies below.

“Hey,” Silverhand called out, and waved V back over to where he leaned against a wall. The door of one of the bathroom stalls had been ripped clear off; inside, the porcelain of the toilet bowl was shattered in on itself and the tank had been seemingly cleaved in two.

“As you can see, one thing I did not get to enjoy while I was alive,” Johnny said, eyeing the broken toilet, “was the wide-spread adoption of bidets across Night City.”

* * *

When he went to kiss River on the water tower—

* * *

V took a long, meandering route to the coordinates he’d been sent. A hundred meters away, he realized something felt eerily familiar about the mounds of trash and abandoned detritus. He let down the Arch’s kickstand and walked the rest of the way.

“Oh, shit,” Johnny said, barely audible.

V rucked up his shirt to pull over his nose and mouth against the stench: there, in the mud, was Dexter DeShawn’s bloated body. Any notion of exploring the area fled in the face of rage; his head filled up with a looping mantra of _fuck you fuck you fuck you_ and before he knew it he was emptying an entire clip into the dead fixer’s face. He smashed the ruined wreck of DeShawn’s head with a length of pipe until it caved in like a rotten melon, until there was nothing left but pink pulpy brains and synthskin and bits of skull smacking wetly against the galvanized iron. He could see the gaping sinus cavity that remained intact, and he kicked the metal toe of his boot against the fragile structure until it, too, collapsed into blood and shattered bone. V’s entire body was shaking; he took big, hysterical gasps of air, panting wildly.

“Do you feel better?” Johnny asked, looking shocked for all his usual coolness. He’d never seen V like this—shit, V couldn’t remember ever doing anything this mindlessly brutal before.

“No,” V answered flatly. Johnny looked him up and down; there was something close to either fear or revulsion behind his eyes. “Fucking—wash up. Drive back to the gas station we passed by earlier.” He disappeared back into the ether.

* * *

V looked himself in the mirror, shaking with adrenaline, dilute blood running from where it had splattered his hands and wrists and swirling down the drain. For a moment, he wasn’t sure that he recognized himself.

* * *

“Johnny?”

V was laid out on the couch after a thorough shower, looking up at the minute cracks and imperfections in the ceiling. Nibbles was curled into a ball on his chest, her nose tucked under her tail. He watched her sides rise and fall rhythmically with each breath. Johnny leaned against the windowsill, his legs crossed at the ankle. V spoke again: “are you... upset about what happened earlier?”

After nearly a minute of standing quietly, Johnny answered him evenly. “Yeah, but not for the reason you might think.” He paused, seemed to carefully consider what he was about to say. “I’m worried I might be starting to influence what... makes you yourself, V. Never seen that kind of anger in you before.”

V stroked the cat’s back and scratched her behind her ears just so he had something to busy his hands. “I don’t know, Johnny. No way to.” Even working counterintel at Arasaka, he tried not to kill if it wasn’t necessary—early on, when he’d decided that was how he wanted to work, it had been him emulating Morgan Blackhand (not that he’d ever admit that openly to Johnny, even if he could read some of his thoughts—it felt like a childish affectation, having role models).

“Yeah. I don’t know,” V echoed. “But maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Johnny said nothing. Intent on breaking the awkward silence, V started talking again: “Thanks for not making fun of me about River. Dunno what I was even thinking, anyhow, trying to get in bed with a pig—sorry, _former_ pig.”

Johnny sat on the other end of the couch, boots up on the coffee table. “It’s ok. You just misread him, kid.” He smirked. “However, I am gonna make fun of your stupid fucking hat,” he said, loosely gesturing to the musty baseball cap V had bought at the trailer park and taken to wearing backwards with his hair down.

V snorted. “Listen—I look hot in it and it keeps my hair out of my face.”

Johnny rolled his eyes, and then asked: “would you do me a favor?”

V turned onto his side (disturbed by the change in position, Nibbles eyed him irritatedly before hopping off onto the floor), chin propped on his hand to look straight at Johnny where he was stretched out on the bed. “Tell me.”

“Let me use your body, just for an hour. I wanna pet the cat.”

V’s mouth opened and then shut; his brow furrowed and then relaxed. “That is... the last thing I expected you to ask for.” He continued to look confused. “I—guess? Sure?” He swung himself upright into a sitting position. “Now?”

Johnny shrugged. “Why not?”


	4. the type of memories that turn your bones to glass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from Cold Blooded Old Times by Smog.
> 
> Some housekeeping/notes for future reference: in-game timelines and those from Cyberpunk 2020/Red don’t align (Johnny would have been 15 in 2003, when the Second Central American War began—and also supposedly started Samurai around that time, according to CP2077? CP2020 states Samurai as beginning in 2006. Let’s say he went AWOL in 2005, when cyberlimbs began being used widely in the US military, and he was born in 1985), so I’m fudging it a little. Also: it’s never canonically established what’s been going on in India during the Pondsmith timeline, besides a few mentions regarding arms and vehicle companies, but I’m going with current projections on climate change in Gujarat. 
> 
> Also, considering that Joy Division, Ministry, Sisters of Mercy, The Smiths, This Mortal Coil, and Nine Inch Nails all exist canonically, I don’t think it’s that big a stretch to assume that Chris Isaak might also, too (referenced song is Wicked Game, if it isn’t obvious).

“Huh,” Vik said, with the intonation of an adult in response to a child who has shared what only they would deem to be of great importance; he held V’s arm by the wrist, turning it this way and that. “I’m gonna guess—from the tattoo—that you’ve been getting along better?” He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, revealing this entirety of his craggy face to V: the crooked pugilist’s nose with the scar over the bridge; the chin split by a heavy, exacting punch; the cheeks pockmarked deeply with acne scars.

“We are,” V sighed, “but _that_ happened when he took my body on a fuckin’ joy ride last week.” Vik snorted, rotated the backless stool he sat on to face his desk. “You want a drink?” he asked, pouring himself a tumbler of bourbon and then a second without waiting for a response from V, who downed it wordlessly. 

“I’ve got some... trust issues going on with him right now—hopefully ones that can be resolved soon,” V sighed, setting the glass down, and he glared at Johnny: his flickering engram was stretched out sideways on the table in a manner not unlike the ancient photo of Burt Reynolds V had masturbated to furiously as a teenager (“aw, dude, no!” Johnny yelled, sitting upright at the suddenly-remembered image, and then, “why the fuck are you so into old guys?!”)

* * *

V fingered the dog tags that newly jangled around his neck (“proof of my promise,” Johnny had told him). He’d woken up that morning at Pistis Sophia with a crippling headache, smelling the iodine tang of the ocean; he and Johnny were now leaned over the stucco wall outside the room, watching the sea and the sky reflect each other’s blue. V gazed over Estero Bay, past the twisting frame of the rollercoaster where it jutted out over the boardwalk in convoluted, thrilling loops and hills; far past the filthy shore, cluttered with trash, and onto the low islands—just a foot or two above water now, at high tide—these stubby little masses of crenelated rock, slick with algae, snagged with plastic. _Good thing,_ he thought, a little sadly, _that there’s no gulls to choke on that any longer, I suppose._

He turned to Johnny with his elbows still on the low wall. “Tell me something I probably don’t know about the ‘20s.”

“I didn’t know you were such a history nerd,” Johnny laughed. 

“Uh, yeah—one of the things in school I actually enjoyed, but ended up finding out more in books from the ‘50s and ‘60s than in there.” V looked down a little shyly. He could swear his bones still ached to the marrow from the biting cold of yesterday’s ice bath.

“Acid rain,” Johnny said, pointing to a car in the parking lot below studded with round indents; V’s thick, black eyebrows knitted together before he found what he was looking for. “See those marks on top?” They stood in silence for a moment, until V hummed in understanding, his Kiroshis focusing on the mottled roof. He tasted phlegmy blood in the back of his mouth, long after spitting it out. 

“Those aren’t from bullets?” V asked him. 

“Bullets?” came Johnny’s laughing rebuke, and the bitter, sneering smirk Rogue would later mention to him. “Nah. Too small, too even. Can’t ever buff that out, not all the way—“

V cut off his droning monologue with a series of retches he tried to hold back, and then promptly vomited the remains of last night’s dinner onto the sidewalk, twenty feet below.

When he finished, wiping his mouth off with a relatively-clean handkerchief he now deemed destined for the dumpster, V squeezed back into the room via the open window and walked into the bathroom.

“Y’know,” he sighed, theatrically dejected, looking over his shoulder at Johnny between splashing the lower half of his face with cold water and gargling with the same, “I was _really_ hoping you were gonna say something about those Carbon Plague kids.”

“I was with you when you heard about that on the radio, you fucking gonk.”

* * *

“Show me,” V said, and Johnny brought his forearm close to show the long-faded scarring beneath the tattoos. There was the faintest dip, a smooth follicle-less stretch of skin.

“Oh,” V murmured, and then echoed himself with the emphasis on the second word. “Ohhhh. _That’s_ how you never got whiskey dick.”

“How the hell did you know? No one does that nowadays.” 

V blanched, felt a shame that wasn’t his own rise up in his gut. “My dad was a urology resident before he came to California. That and y’know, being a kid with an insatiable curiosity and unread books in the house, whatever they were...”

“Please take a swig of that tequila. I haven’t had to talk to a cis person about this for over _fifty_ fuckin’ years.”

V did as requested, pouring a glugging stream into his mouth from the aged bottle he’d taken when leaving Atlantis. His throat burned; he barely held back a sputtering cough before speaking again. “I know that by, like, the early ‘20s they were starting to do biosculpture—why didn’t you get, uh, an upgrade?” 

Johnny looked baffled. “What—replace my beautiful designer dick with another one?” He snorted. “That was—surgery was a fuckin’ deal, but afterwards—that was me, flesh and blood. And never had a complaint about my performance.”

“I saw,” V grumbled.

* * *

Johnny’s grief over Alt mirrored V’s own over Jackie.

He didn’t talk about it, but V felt stabs of it, nonetheless: when he walked past a boom box in Reconciliation Park playing an old Chris Isaak song from nearly a century back; when Johnny did a double-take at a blonde woman with a golden arm and tried to laugh it off; in the moments where Silverhand’s above-it-all, cooler-than-you-tough-guy façade slipped. He was so damn full of himself, and she’d been too smart for him.

She wasn’t dead, in a way, but she’d cut him off long ago, and V felt that that could have been even more painful than death—at least there was a finality to Jackie’s end. He knew, better than most, how the absence of hope could lead to a painful, stunning clarity. And anyhow, that wasn’t even really Alt, not anymore: just a flickering red datastream two stories tall in the shape of a woman Johnny had once loved, despite never admitting as much.

* * *

Shouldering past the junk as he stepped out of the freight elevator (first the glitching vending machine he’d offered to repair multiple times; clusters of empty NiCola cans and crumbling styrofoam coolers; stacked office chairs, all missing their foam stuffing; then the warped metal filing cabinets with flaking finish; then, rounding the corner, full garbage bags in clusters of threes and fours), V was interrupted by what he hoped would be the final one of Skippy’s incessant, pleading reminders to return them to their previous owner ( _or is it him?_ V thought, with the decidedly masculine, well-enunciated English accent the algorithm used?). Despite the widespread filth in her office that contrasted an otherwise orderly personality, and despite a series of near-suicidal encounters—thankfully now finished—with cyberpsychos she’d sent him on, V felt a stubborn sense of loyalty to Regina. Her face was delighted when he set the gun on the metal crate.

“Hey,” he called out, just before leaving. “Thanks for taking a chance on me when no one else would.” She smiled back at him until the corners of her remaining eye creased.

* * *

“He had a great dick, didn’t he?” Misty asked him on the holo, and V laughed harder than he could remember in weeks, hard enough that he had to pull over on his bike and wipe the tears out of his eyes. 

“Ah, shit, Misty—we were some lucky fuckin’ gonks to have him, weren’t we?”

* * *

Judy called as he was leaving Claire’s garage. Her voice was flat but urgent, and V knew he needed to go to her right then. When he got to her building off of Charter, he ran up the fire escape, taking the stairs in twos, and nearly tripped on the grated metal in his haste. When the bathroom door slid open—

He saw Ev’s head first, slack against the rim of the tub, lying motionless. Smelled the blood before he even stepped in. “Oh, fuck,” he breathed. Judy was hunched over, looking smaller than he’d ever seen her. 

“I was—I was only gone an hour—“ Judy sobbed. He kneeled down on the blood-spattered bathmat. 

“How’d it happen?” he asked. 

“I don’t know!” she cried, and raised her face from her balled-up hands, her mascara running all the way down to her jaw. She started to try and explain, but he caught her wrists in his hands and pulled her to him. She sagged against him, shook with big, full-body sobs, her face pressed between his neck and shoulder. “Judy,” he told her, “it’s not your fault, you hear me? She made up her mind. Would’ve found a way. Always.” 

Johnny whined about how it wouldn’t make a difference, carrying her to the bed, and V felt an incredible anger rise up in his chest. “Could you have a fucking _modicum_ of respect?” he snarled, unable and unwilling to bite back the anger in his voice.

He cradled Evelyn as gently as he could, arms under his neck and knees, and set her down on the woven white blanket. V watched the blood pool under her prone body, too slow and numb to do anything about it. _I’ll buy her a new guest mattress,_ he thought. 

“Gonna put somethin’ on her,” Judy said. “Rather she look like a person than a body. Could you wait outside?”

He shut the door. He went into the bathroom. He scrubbed until his hands went raw.

* * *

V didn’t ask what had happened with Rogue—and Johnny didn’t volunteer any details—but he sat there and listened, and then Silverhand rattled off a series of apologies that V wanted, desperately, to believe were genuine.

* * *

There were two aging punks on his right as he walked into Dino’s bar. V leaned against the column just past them to listen discreetly:

“If someone told my mother fifty years ago that Eurodyne’d sell out too...” grumbled the one with the spiked hair, and Johnny barked an angry laugh. 

“What,” he mocked, “she wouldn’t have banged your shitstain father that night?”

V rolled his eyes and looked down at the scuffed, checkered linoleum. 

“If you’re a rebel, you die for what you believe in or you live long enough to join the system and fade away. No other option.”

 _Bullshit,_ V mouthed to Johnny, who was outright glowering at this point, standing unseen right next to the pair of aged rockerboys with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Well said, choom,” agreed the other, raising his pint glass in a toast. “Another decade or two, no one will remember the guy. They’ll find another kid with big dreams, promise him a mountain of ‘ganic gold... then muzzle him with a corpo contract.”

“Shit, man. We believed in you, Kerry.”

V wanted badly to cut in and say something about how ridiculous it was for them to idolize someone to such an extent, but thought better of it and walked up to the bar.

Dino seemed to appraise him with an air of disbelief: he looked V from head to booted feet to head again. “I didn’t think you’d be so... short,” the fixer muttered, and V couldn’t help but give an obvious, exasperated sigh.

* * *

“You ever lose a best friend?” Mitch asked him, his eyes soft and a little wet.

“Yeah. His name was Jackie.”

Even unmarked besides crude wooden X’s, the four graves, side by side and piled with stones, felt far less impersonal than the Columbarium. There was something to be said about going back to the earth like that, he thought, and the same for how the Aldecaldos redistributed the property of the dead—another way of living on in the daily lives of those you left behind. V was sweating under his leather vest, the sun hot and hard on his bare arms. 

“You’ll see, V,” Mitch promised. “Trust me.”

He remembered Jackie’s earnest face: _trust me_ , he’d said, before the first time he’d put his dick up Vikram’s ass, before each gig, before they met up with Dexter DeShawn—and V had, a hundred times over, time and time again. 

“Holy shit,” he swore, stunned when he saw Scorpion’s corpse, slouched in the driver’s seat beneath the horned skull mounted over the windshield—but he followed Mitch’s instructions to the letter. Who was he to defy what the dead wanted? 

V lit the rag poking out of the gas cap and stepped back several paces to stand next to Mitch. The car ignited and rolled over the ruined bridge into the dried-out riverbed, bursting into a smoldering wreck. He gagged for a moment at the smell of burning hair and skin before the wind changed direction. 

He’d saved one life, at least: his and Mitch’s paths had crossed at the right time. V took the offered figurine (he wasn’t quite sure what—or who, for that matter—it was supposed to depict; nonetheless, it lived on the dashboard of the Porsche from then on). “You’re all right," Mitch told him, opening a beer, and V responded that he and the Aldecaldos were starting to feel like kin—that cracked a toothy smile from the panzerboy’s grim face.

They sat side-by-side in silence and watched the fire burn away until there was nothing left but the black, twisted bones of the car’s chassis and a scattering of ashes.


	5. that’s when i reach for my revolver

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This turned out way longer than the others. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Finally: Kerry and the Depression Mansion!

There were long days of nothing, every now and then: no gigs, no news from any of V’s contacts—just waiting, and hoping, and walking aimlessly around the city. He would sleep over at Judy’s once a week, and he got better at making it back to his own apartment on the other nights. He had bought her a new guest mattress like he’d promised himself—a nice one, and a full instead of the cramped little twin—but chose one on the firm side, figuring he would be the only one sleeping on it. It turned out it wasn’t actually the guest room; Judy’d been sleeping on the couch with Evelyn there.

He often would fall asleep after several drinks and watching another Bushido sequel, wake in the middle of the night, and poke his head through the curtain of mirrored sequins screening the neighboring room to find Judy hunched over her keyboard or scrolling a BD, bathed in blue light from the array of monitors. He’d bring her a glass of water and remind her to fix her posture, and an hour or so later she would crawl into bed besides him. They would shift throughout the night: sometimes back-to-back, sometimes both on their stomachs, sometimes with Judy’s head on his chest, and sometimes with her as what they joked was “the little big spoon”. The unspoken—but obvious—truth about why they didn’t ever sleep with V’s belly to her back was his fear of getting an erection in sleep (a natural process, sure, and he knew they’d laugh it off if it happened—but better to avoid it, V thought). He’d missed being held, and he’d missed this level of platonic intimacy in a friendship. He’d had it with Jackie when they were younger, but there’d been a whole ‘nother layer to that, obviously. 

Judy told him about the fire truck. V told her about the first time he’d killed someone.

He’d been 11, had just gotten his first cyberdeck, and thought it’d be fun to mess with the traffic lights at the intersection of Poorwill and Anderson. He and Jackie laughed to the point of tears, punching each other in the shoulder in the way boys do, and watched the confused but grateful pedestrians cross the street for minutes on end, punctuated by the regular, robotic refrain to walk—and then one driver had enough of it, stepped out from his car, and shot a woman point-blank in the gut. V remembered the screaming, the glistening viscera spilling out in coiled ropes just three yards from him; feeling paralyzed with fear and horror and guilt before Jackie grabbed his wrist and they ran and ran and ran until they just couldn’t anymore.

He felt himself becoming agitated in the telling of it, felt his chest tighten up, heart going too fast. "V," Judy soothed, as if calming a skittish colt, and she reached for his hand and held it between her own, "it wasn’t your fault. Same as me and Ev, like you told me—and you were just a kid. It was an accident. If he hadn’t gotten out of his car and shot that woman then, he would have killed someone later on that day, or that week." She squeezed his fingers between her palms. "People like that—with that kind of violence, that kind of innate rage in them—it’s inevitable that they’re gonna kill, especially here." 

Something shifted in him on hearing this, a near-lifelong guilt sliding just a little off his burdened shoulders.

In the mornings, bleary-eyed, he’d sit at the kitchen counter with coffee and cereal and watch the little clownfish and gobies circling in the fish tank. The hiss of the aquarium pump nearly drowned out the noise from the neighboring apartments, if you stood close enough to the glass.

* * *

"I hate him," V fumed through a mouthful of oil-slick noodles and broth, pointing at the television with his spoon. There was a daytime rerun playing of yesterday's _News at Night_ ; Ziggy Q nattered on animatedly about cyberpsychosis before transitioning into his usual bait-and-switch on the guest.

He and Misty sat in the back room of the esoterica shop with Vic, who had ascended from his clinic for a lunch break—V had brought Nagami Market over for all of them, which was apparently enough to draw the ripperdoc away from watching more decade-old boxing matches. The air was redolent with grease and nag champa, and they sat facing each other over the petite folding table Vic had brought upstairs, knees all touching underneath it in the cramped space, eating and rolling their eyes and laughing at the TV in angry disbelief and repeating their old private jokes to each other. 

Sometimes they talked about V and what he’d been up to (and Vic always demanded a report on Relic malfunctions and symptoms). Sometimes Misty would regale them with stories of her weirdest customers. Sometimes, like today, V and Misty bragged to Vic about what Mama Welles had cooked for them that weekend—pozole with real jarred tomatillos and hominy, sent all the way from Jalisco by Lupe's cousin—and now V pointedly made a suggestion that the two of them should meet. Vic was unable to hide how his face flushed, and turned away for a moment, but V could tell he liked the idea. “She's beautiful, and kind, and smart, and strong as hell,” V told him. “But,” he cautioned, smirking, "she’s basically me and Misty’s mom, now. Take that as you will.”

Johnny was perched in the corner on top of some stacked metal trunks, his legs stretched out to brace his boots against the opposite wall. “V.”

“Hmm?” he hummed in response, sipping from his cup of water.

“Why do you insist on doing shit like this when you’re dying and we’re running out of time? This, Judy, having dinner with Misty and Lupe every week—should be out there looking for answers. We're running out of time.”

“Because,” V said, stabbing the plastic fork into the slick, fat udon harder than he needed to, “whatever’s left of this life isn’t worth living without my friends.”

* * *

V stood at the eastern end of the plaza over Ring Road. “My dad worked in there, last few years of his life,” he explained to Johnny, looking up at the glassy black monolith of the Petrochem tower, shading his eyes from the midday sun with the back of his hand. “Low-level stuff, obviously—never ended up with an office, but he never wanted one anyhow.” He smiled wryly. “Wanna show you somewhere special to me.” 

He walked down the stairs to street level, and then northeast, beneath the angled cantilever at the base of the tower and through the blue-grey noonday shadow it cast. There were four tall, square glass buildings standing perpendicular to each other, flanked by an overpass. Johnny sent some digital spit onto the pavement, sputtering: “fuckin’—Night City Center for Behavioral Health? Like where you did that extraction? They broke that woman, V.”

“We both _know_ you have the ability to delta out from this—" V moved one hand back and forth horizontally, trying to capture what he meant but failing (which must have looked like a weird tic to passersby), "—I don’t know, plane of consciousness or whatever when you want to, Johnny. Can show you or not—I’m well aware that they sponsor this place, and I hate ‘em as much as you.” He wished he could have broken them all out. He would’ve needed backup for that.

Silverhand grumbled, made a little mocking pantomime of V in a higher pitch, and lit a half-finished cigarette. 

V chose the northwest building, which was totally empty; as soon as the glass door slid shut behind him, the air smelled green and clear and a little humid, the noises of the city outside blocked out by some kind of proprietary soundproofing. There were two tall, crooked foothill pines in the center of the room, surrounded by clumps of bamboo, all of it swaying in an artificial breeze. “There’s birds?” Johnny blurted, and V could swear he heard a note of excitement.

“I used to hope as much, too, but it’s just recorded birdsong,” V answered, starting to climb the spiral stairs to the second level. “Hear it? It’s looping.”

Johnny ground the digital butt of his cigarette into the landing with the toe of one boot. “Will you just—humor me, please? You sure there’s not a real bird in here?”

V, in his infinite grace and patience, investigated all four buildings until Johnny was satisfied.

* * *

They passed the Memorial Park NCART station as they left, and a memory rose up in V, unbidden but not unwanted: squatting down (but not kneeling, so as to preserve the knees of his dress pants from piss and dirt) in the bathroom for one of the countless men he’d cruised there after work, seeing his own desire reflected in their eyes. “Mine isn’t the first trans dick you’ve sucked, huh?” Johnny sneered, very smug with himself, and V couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “No, Johnny,” he signed, “but if that’s what you wanna call my putting up with your attitude—which I’m startin’ to get real tired of—it’s only because you’re the only person out there I can’t punch in the face for treating me like that.”

Johnny shut up after that, until they’d made it to the top level of the plaza again. “V,” he interrupted, suddenly looking very serious as they stood before the second Arasaka tower. “How many died?” V knew the number well, but didn’t want to speak it himself for fear of Johnny protesting it was just an inflated figure he’d learned as a corpo. “Something else you should see,” he said, and walked down the stairs again towards the memorial.

* * *

There was something different in Johnny, after that. A little softer around the edges. Still snarky, but some of the cruelty was rounded off.

* * *

Nibbles was curled contentedly on V’s lap as he sat at his desktop. How had he ended up with this battered chair upholstered in purple leopard-print velour, anyhow? He couldn’t remember. The cat would periodically knead at his leg, the sharp pinpricks of her claws poking through the fabric of his pants (it was his fault, really, since he kept putting off trimming her nails), and even though he kept muttering “ow” again and again—with no reaction from Nibbles—he didn’t have the heart to move her.

Despite the best efforts of coworkers and teachers, V had never really learned to type; he was still a pecker, evidenced by the staccato tapping on the keyboard in the otherwise silent apartment. “What’re you doing?” Johnny asked, peering over V’s shoulder with his sunglasses lowered to halfway down his nose. 

“Writing a will,” V answered, without turning to look at the engram. 

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because,” V explained, swiveling in his seat to face Johnny, “not gonna have any use for all of this if I’m dead.” He gestured to the bed (and to his recent investment: sheets in real flax linen), the armory room, and then to the window as if that would cover the abstract: the unseen multitude of cars parked below that he’d collected as gifts or bribes, the near-million eddies sitting in his bank account. “I don’t think it’d be fair to make my chooms sort through all my shit and try to decide how to divvy up my things—or even worse, for the city to take it all.”

“Even right now, there’s so much I just... don’t need,” V continued. “Like, all the vehicles, for instance—you know I don’t use any of them besides the bikes, or the Porsche if I wanna be flashy. Gotta decide exactly what goes to who, still, and gonna sit down with an accountant this week and make a few investments.”

Johnny’s brow scrunched in confusion: “what? Investments?”

“Just in case things don’t go as planned,” V said, scratching Nibbles under her chin with his blunt fingernails. “I wanna make sure you’ll have a cushion, so to speak. From what you’ve told me you didn’t... handle finances well—scraping the bottom of the barrel between tours and all that.”

“Don’t need to think about that,” Johnny huffed. “Told you—gonna give you back your body.”

“Why not prepare for if that _doesn’t_ happen, though? In case it doesn’t work out? If it does, no biggie about the investments—can leave them be or pull ‘em out.”

Johnny gave him a constipated look and crossed his arms over his chest. V sighed and stood up, walking to the coffee table; Nibbles finally jumped off his lap as he rose, and she began grooming her paws as if nothing had happened. He sat down, found the lighter where it was wedged between the couch cushions, and took a deep hit from the glass dick Johnny had affectionately nicknamed “the Dong Bong”; held the smoke until he tasted it on the back of his tongue.

* * *

In the morning, on his way to North Oak, he stopped at the Columbarium with flowers for Evelyn.

“Are your parents here?” asked Johnny as V walked under the first of the stone arches at the entrance. 

“We didn’t have money for my dad, but my mom is.” When they reached the top of the stairs, V pointed east to the far end of the funerary complex, where the tiered concrete was periodically interrupted with yellow Japanese maples. “She’s down there,” V said. “‘Throw my body into a damn trash heap when this world is done with me,’ my dad told me. Didn’t care either way. Petrochem paid out a life insurance policy, and that kept us afloat for a while, but my mom was always sick.” 

Johnny pressed his lips together in a grim line. “Sorry.” V waved off the unexpected apology, which seemed weirdly sympathetic considering who it came from.

“Never really came out here,” Silverhand murmured, looking out over the red clay hills to the east where storm clouds gathered, barren except for flowering sagebrush and shaggy fan palms and wild rye. “It’s... beautiful, really.”

“C’mon,” V said, motioning for Johnny to follow him. “Your parents buried in Texas?”

“My mom was, died early on. Doubt my dad ever left.” Johnny made a dry, humorless laugh. “He was the meanest son of a bitch I ever met. Would piss on his grave if I had the chance.”

“Could forget about all this and drive you out there,” suggested V, and even he wasn’t sure how much he was joking.

They wove in and out of the columns, searching for Ev’s niche. “Used to have a computer system with everyone catalogued,” V griped. “Columbarium is city-owned, though, and they cut the funding for that a few years back.” He pulled out his holo, started to text Judy to ask exactly where Evelyn was, and then thought better of it. Ten minutes later, growing more frustrated by the second, V finally found her marker. 

“I know you tried,” he whispered, laying the dozen chrysanthemums on the ground, and he didn’t know what else to say beyond that.

V was about to leave, but Johnny clasped his shoulder, gesturing with a jerk of his head towards where sunlight striped the tiles at the innermost part of the complex. “Can we...?” Silverhand started, and V finished for him, gambling on intuition: “you wanna see someone.” 

Johnny deflated a little, his shoulders dropping. “Yeah. I’d like that.” V wasn’t surprised that it was Alt Cunningham; what did throw him, and Johnny too, was the niche next to hers. 

“Well, Robert John Linder,” V pronounced, inefficiently trying to wipe away the sweat that had collected below the band of his hat with his inner forearm, “you _do_ have an actual marker—something more than just your initials scraped into some metal. Good epitaph, too.” 

“Wonder who put me here,” Johnny mused quietly, looking far more contemplative than the solo had expected. 

“I bet Rogue would know,” V began, pulling out his holo again, before Silverhand cut him off. 

“Don’t—she hasn’t contacted you, right? Means she still wants some space.” 

Not expecting an answer, V shoved his hands deeply into his pockets and asked, “you still aren’t gonna tell me what happened on your date?” Johnny pinched the bridge of his nose, gave a big, shuddering sigh, and spoke.

“You remember on the _Ebunike_ how Grayson was saying some shit about her lying down with the corps?”

“Yeah. Didn’t think much of it, though—figured he was just trying to buy some more time, save his ass a little longer before he got pistol-whipped.” 

V followed Johnny towards the entrance, listening keenly as he continued to explain. “I think it was something to do with that. We were fooling around—“ he began, and V raised his eyebrows in response; he’d figured that much would happen, but not that he’d be hearing secondhand about how his own body had been used. “—but nothing really happened. She stopped things before they went that far. Didn’t tell me much, besides that it wasn’t fair to me with her being so different than she was fifty years ago.” 

Vikram snorted, walking down the stairs, and rounded the corner towards where he’d parked the blue Itsumade. “Of course she’s a different person than she was half a century ago!” he exclaimed, and Johnny looked back over one shoulder to get the last word: “I think Rogue believes she’s not good enough for me ‘cause she’s had to break her own code of ethics to survive this long.”

 _That’s all of us, though,_ thought V, in the part of his brain he somehow kept walled-off from Johnny.

He unlocked the bike and swung one leg over the saddle to sit down, but didn’t yet start it or take either foot off the ground, thinking about the epitaph on Cunningham’s niche. “I didn’t understand before, but _Never Fade Away_ is about you and Alt, obviously.”

“Yeah,” Johnny affirmed, nodding. He looked north to where the big white sign stood against the sky. “Yeah. It was. It is.”

* * *

V definitely could have just walked over, he now realized. He’d only rode—what, 200 meters?—down Lilac before he came to the parking lot at the base of the hill. He stood at the edge of the shallow man-made pond Johnny had guided him to, kicking up clods of dirt and manicured grass with the heel of his boot like he was a kid again, watching from the sidelines with a book while Jackie played fútbol with his pachuco homeboys.

“Why’re we here?” he asked, watching Johnny as he skipped a stone over the flat water. His gaze was redirected to the massive house above; just a sliver of blue glass was visible from this angle, but what he could see suggested immeasurable wealth. 

He stooped to pick up a stone himself, attempted to copy Johnny, and failed miserably. The smooth pebble immediately sunk, and V decided to not make another try and potentially open himself up to a running joke about his reflexes.

“So,” he said when Johnny was finished giving him a brief history of Samurai and its members, “what those two geezers at Dino’s were saying about Kerry selling out was basically true? _And_ he’s suicidal?” Johnny eyed him, smirking defiantly.

“Only one way to find out.”

* * *

Like most of the B&Es he’d done over the years, V chose an indirect route to get where he needed to be. He knew he could easily jump the wall, but instead he followed it around to where it was broken by a natural rock formation—and a dick, hairy balls and all, spraypainted in pink on the stucco. “Whoa,” Johnny marveled, and V had to muffle a laugh with his inner elbow. “It’s like, symbolic.”

He climbed up the red rock and laid belly-down on the sun-warmed face of it, trying to keep as flat and unnoticeable as possible while he scanned the area. No cameras, surprisingly, but there were a number of those new Carroli security bots—if the failed suicide attempt story was true, perhaps Kerry had replaced his human bodyguard with them. He waited, and kept still, and one-by-one he easily eliminated the mechanical guards, watching as they each burnt out in a spray of sparks.

The entire property seemed an exercise in excess. The landscaping was relatively well-kept, but everything else... 

“Fuck,” Johnny muttered, voicing what both of them thought.

There was trash all over: stacks of broken-down boxes, the cardboard warped by rain and sun; takeout containers, beer cans, astounding quantities of empty dime bags and whisky bottles and hollow kegs; there was also a scattering of abandoned swimwear and a metal detector half-buried in sand at the edge of the pool. “Looks like he either drinks too much, or has a lot of parties here, or both,” he concluded out loud, which Johnny let go unanswered.

V walked up to one of the bots he’d fried, and nudged the woven, conical hat with the toe of his boot. “Isn’t he Pinoy?” he asked, looking to Johnny. “Yeah.” “Well... at least he seems to have a sense of humor.” They started towards the front door; surprisingly, it was unlocked, and swung open under V’s hand.

The villa was full of what Vikram’s father had once thoughtfully articulated as “mammal smells”: unwashed skin and hair; the sour, sharp cat-piss sweat that came with anxiety or wearing polyester; the scent of greasy, half-eaten takeout left to mold or rot or dry out into withered, unrecognizable shapes. V wasn’t at all unfamiliar with the stench of depression.

There was a exquisitely-formed triple-perc bong—translucent lavender glass, nearly a meter tall—besides the piano. V squatted next to it and sat back on his heels, squinting disgustedly at the bottom of the piece, where tarry black flecks and transparent blobs of algae floated in dirty water. “Fucking nasty,” he swore, more than a little disheartened at such a waste. The bowl was packed with a mounded pile of golden kief, scorched on top and overfull nearly to spilling.

V climbed the stairs by the crowded table, figuring that if Kerry wasn’t up there he’d at least be able to look over the first floor for him. Everywhere in the mansion—in the corners and lining the walls and gathered around furniture—were empty bottles and glasses filmy with residue, clothes and dirty silverware and hockey sticks and old newspapers, as if there had been a party and no one had bothered to clean up. “What the fuck,” V muttered, both to himself and to Johnny. “Not hard to tell how low Kerry’s feeling—obviously, he could afford to hire a cleaner if he wanted to.”

He crossed the second floor to the north side of the house, and tried a double door next to the jukebox, failing to unlock it. Johnny called out from up ahead, V following his voice past the bar and down the stairs to where Silverhand stood, taking in a floor-to-ceiling painting of Eurodyne in the nude: the subject was in profile, armor at his feet, and with the red light illuminating Kerry from an unseen source at the side, it reminded V of the first time he’d spotted Pepe. He stood next to Johnny for a moment, admiring the Aerondight parked on the other side of the glass, and went back upstairs.

The bed was neatly made but there was, inexplicably, a cue stick on top of the sheets, and only a bolster and a single square pillow—satin, V guessed, so it wouldn’t mess up his hair. There were various bottles of liquor on the trunk at the foot of Kerry’s bed, along with a pile of dogeared books, a full ashtray, a half-eaten burger, and a pint carton of souring milk. “Gross,” V protested, directed as much at the cigarette butts as it was the spoiled food. Tucked into the thriving monstera at the headboard, next to a single sandal, was a gallon jug of tequila.

V sat on the floor at the round, marble table opposite the bed, and opened up the laptop there to read through the messages. It felt a little weird, considering he was probably going to interact with Kerry later on, but wasn’t this what he always did in a stranger’s house? “Johnny,” he sighed, “looks like Kerry really did just want a painting of his own ass.” He kept scrolling down, reading. “Also: an ex-wife and two kids, and doesn’t seem to have a great relationship with any of them?” There was obviously no wind-up organ grinder monkey, nor were there fifteen figure skaters (though, judging by the mess—and the women’s undergarments—there might have been, recently).

Johnny flickered next to him. “Come _on_ ,” he urged V, who followed him back down the stairs and towards the sound of falling water. “Looks like he’s showering?” V remarked, and Johnny was ready. He found himself strangely at ease, comfortable with the decision to cede control of his own body. He threw his head back and swallowed the pill dry.

* * *

The first time they met, Kerry’s earnest and concerned face was hovering over V’s own. There was gold limning his throat, and he wore a short, silky dressing gown printed with paisley. When he bent over, V could see where the robe opened under the tie at his waist. He was wearing black briefs.

“Just sit tight for a bit, rest; don’t worry about a thing,” Eurodyne told him, gripping his shoulder, and V laid back, slouched against the couch.

“I know your face,” V said before Kerry walked away, his voice softer than he’d meant. “Of course you do,” Kerry laughed from the hallway. 

“No, I mean—“ he grasped for the right words. Remembered eyes dark as petroleum instead of cold, icy blue. “—like, how you used to look. In Johnny’s memories. There’s—I’ve seen some of them.” 

Johnny, perched on the opposite couch, gave him a tired look. “And?” Kerry asked from the second floor. “You think I looked better then?” Eurodyne was so at ease and sure of himself in the way celebrities were—or at least appeared to be. “No, no,” V protested. "Just—different. The eyes, mainly.”

And the hair, and the freckles, and the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that V found so endearing and attractive in older men.

V realized his head hurt and touched his forehead, feeling for where the pain came from, and found where his brow had been bisected with crusted blood. “What happened?” he asked Johnny.

“With your face? Or what I found out about Kerry?”

“Both. Heard you two talk about the reunion gig as the pill started wearing off, so no reason to rehash that part.”

“Well,” Johnny explained, “he hit me with the butt of his gun—I mean, us—when he found out I was back. As for the rest, he told me all kinds of bullshit. Like being depressed was just a media ploy, but you saw this place. And that no one remembers Samurai,” he said, frowning. “Also, he told me he never leaves the house. No surprise there.”

V went upstairs to tell Kerry he was leaving, and found Eurodyne laid out on the bed, his legs open to invitingly frame the silky black pouch of his underwear. "Need a power nap. Wanna join me?”

“Uh,” V murmured, unsure of how to answer before Johnny cut in and convinced him Kerry was joking. “That’d be nice,” he responded, the statement turning into a question at the end, “but it looks like I need to go rescue Nancy from an interview? So I’m gonna go now.”

Kerry didn’t answer him. His eyes were already closed.

He jumped the gate on his way out. “Heard the part about Kerry saying I’m his new input, if there’s too many questions. He seeing anyone?”

Johnny was doing some perfunctory hand stretches, or maybe flexing his air guitar skills—V wasn’t knowledgeable enough about music to say which it was. “Mentioned some guy named Miguel, but didn’t get any more out of him than that. Not on good terms with the ex-wife, as you know. What—you into him?” Johnny laughed. “Or he at least gets your dick hard?”

“Yeah,” V told him, when what he wanted to say was: he makes my mouth go dry. When he touched me I felt my heart catch in my throat.


	6. an interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh no! Poor V had to get his ID replaced!


End file.
